The Camera
In 3D rendering, raycasting is a render technique used to draw the scene. This enables complex interactions to take place without calculating all of the possible light physics in the scene.
Here is our scene
To start lets show how light works. It is emitted by the sun in all directions. A small amount of these light rays will bounce off of objects in such a way as to eventually enter the camera frame.
We can calculate these rays based on the materials they bounce off of and the intensity of the light based on scattering.
The amount of rays and interactions are basically infinite, going in every direction and bouncing countless times. Also, the ones going in the wrong direction would brick the program in what is basically an endless loop, waiting for their terminus. They would need to be artificially stopped at some point by a maximum time or distance limit.
They needed to think of a more efficient way. What if we could know which rays would actually hit the camera, and only focus on those?
Lets reverse the system where the camera emits the rays and we calculate how those interact. For each pixel on the screen, we can shoot a ray in that direction to see what it hits.
Now we can control the amount of bounces the rays take, and back-propagate the color and intensity, only calculating what we need.
This technique is called raytracing, and enables complex light behavior like reflection, scattering, and diffusion with drastically lower computation.
Causal Casting
Let’s now imagine that consciousness is performing the same role as the camera in our scene.
Instead of a signal receiver, you act as a sudo-generator, not actually casting out energy, but selectively collapsing it by being part of the calculation.
The camera only needs a tiny portion of the possible light rays to generate the full scene from its perspective, and you need only to collapse a tiny portion of quantum fields to generate the full universe from your perspective.
This necessity is intertwined with Causality, as it may be required for events to be able to be perceived at all.
In a similar way that a maximum speed of propagation is needed to preserve cause-effect relationships - a limit on interaction possibility is needed to avoid an infinite amount of consideration (calculation) in the universe.
Example
Because the light cast out by the sun in the opposite direction as you, into the void of space, is needed as part of the same calculation to discover the sum of all light that is entering your eyes, it would take an infinite amount of time to finish the calculation, since those rays never interact with you again - but are still limited in speed by causality.
How could you know those light rays won’t bounce off of something and enter your eyes unless it is dependent on the exact point of time and location from where you are looking?
By not seeing them, you know something about their state. You know that they are not here.
Even though you seemingly will never interact.
The only way this could be possible is if the endpoint, the observer, is inherently considered within the interaction. Otherwise, it leads to an infinite amount of consideration (infinite buffering), permitting no events to ever be perceived in the universe.
The components that need to be considered could never be added up into the perception.
The “Consideration” Paradox and Determinism
In video games, the raycast is possible because we can shoot a ray out of the camera, calculate all it’s interactions, and back-propagate in time for each frame.
In the vast universe, this would be impossible due to the speed of light. When you look at a galaxy that is millions of light years away, it would take twice as long for you to shoot a ray out and have it return, right?
This could only work in a deterministic universe.
Like a rendered video instead of an interactive video game.
These interactions would need to be “baked in” from the beginning of the universe. Where you as an observer could be considered as part of the calculation with every other thing in the universe.
The universe was once a single point, which means everything you are, right now, was there too - along with everything else. You are the big bang, being just another event in the primordial expansion.
This limit on consideration may even explain why a big bang is necessary in the first place.
Spoiler
The infinite consideration glitch above may be explained by Light Cones, Quantum Field Theory and the x Wave-particle duality.
Light isn’t actually individual mathematical vectors being shot out of the sun with paths that need to be calculated. It is a field propagation, that can be described as a wave function with no “processing” required.
Basically, it’s the difference between y = x^2 and the list of numbers from executing it: 1,2,4,9,16,25,etc…
Maybe the universe is the equation, and we are the list.